Kathmandu, Sept 22: The Supreme Court has upheld the Department of Passports’ decision to award the passport printing contract to German company Veridos.
The court on Monday dismissed a petition filed by French company IDEMIA challenging the contract award. A division bench of Justices Kumar Regmi and Shrikant Paudel issued the ruling.
IDEMIA, which had competed for the passport printing contract, initially challenged the department’s decision before the Public Procurement Review Committee. After the committee upheld the award, the company took the matter to the Supreme Court.
IDEMIA argued that bidders were required to provide a primary “lead server”, but the rival company had proposed a “rack server” and should therefore have been disqualified.
The French company also maintained that two printing machines would not be sufficient for passport production. It said the “N plus one” model required three machines.
Its third argument concerned the bid opening date. IDEMIA claimed that the date on which the first envelope was opened should not be treated as the bid opening date. Instead, it argued, the date on which the financial bid was opened or registered should be recognised as the official bid opening date.
The Public Procurement Review Committee had rejected all three claims. It concluded that there was no basis to intervene in the Department of Passports’ decision to award the contract to Veridos and upheld the department’s decision.
People’s News Monitoring Service
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